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Take chances. Abandon all the rules. Ditch the recipe. Color outside the lines.

Friday, June 7, 2013

Cups of Coffee and Power Rangers DVD's

Confession: I, Jess,
sometimes get excited about really silly things. For example, the original Mighty Morphin
Power Rangers from when I was a kid is now on DVD, and yes, I did scream like a
little girl when I saw it in Walmart and immediately bought it without looking
at the price tag.

Another one? When the band leader at church starts singing
an old school rock song during band practice I stop, midsentence of my other
conversations, and start professing my love to the band.

Also, any time I go somewhere and there is unexpectedly
a pot of coffee ready, I will melt into a puddle and forever praise the name of
wherever that place may be.

Now that you
all know how much of a nerd I am, I will coyly tie this in to my next
point. I think we get too excited about
the wrong things in the church sometimes.
We cheer for the building fund filling up, the number of people we’ve
lured to our pews, and how many of our children can recite John 3:16. Don’t get me wrong, those are all great
things, but really they are just cups of coffee and Power Rangers DVDs and have
little value in the big picture.

We have
passion for God but it’s for gaining his favor by doing good things in the name
of Christian service. We think to
ourselves I will be closer to God if I tithe more, go on visitation, read my
bible, pray constantly, do my quiet times, memorize verses, never drink or
smoke, and win people to my way of thinking.
Those things are great things but if you are doing them in order to gain
something from God then really that’s not passion for God that’s just passion
for yourself.

There is a verse in Romans
that covers this exact situation. The
Jews and the Christian Gentiles were at odds.
The Jews still believed you had to live by the law (doing things to be
right with God) and the Gentiles were all about liberty through grace. Then you have Jewish Christians (much like
churches in America today) who tried to mix law with grace and call it
balance. The book of Romans is filled
with the conflicting Theology between these groups and Paul consistently
reminds us that we are completely righteous through Christ’s sacrifice.

“I can testify that they are zealous for God, but their zeal
is not in line with the truth. For ignoring the righteousness that comes from
God, and seeking instead to establish their own righteousness, they did not
submit to God’s righteousness. For Christ is the end of the law, with the
result that there is righteousness for everyone who believes.”

Zealous is a good word. Most of the time it gets translated
as passion, but really it’s more than that.
Zeal is eager desire, enthusiastic diligence, and fervor for a
cause. Zeal makes you strive, push, and
grasp at that thing you are zealous for.
Often times our zeal for God leads us to the thinking that we can somehow
get more from him if we try harder.

We
have the fullness of God’s favor, grace, pleasure, and righteousness. Yet, still, we strain to make our own
righteousness as if we could in some way out do Christ’s sacrifice that made us
completely right with God. We are
righteous. You can’t get any more righteous you just either are or you’re
not. You are alive or you are dead,
there are no such thing as zombies (sorry to all the gamers out there).

I am zealous.
Zealous for the revolution of grace.
Zealous for a Christ who doesn’t just save me from hell and then expect
something from me as a thank you, but for a Christ who made me his bride, died
for my freedom, and infused me with his own standing with his Father. That… is something we should be excited
about!